Crap.

Here I am, sweet, sweet readers, writing to you from the trenches. Of hell. Oh yes.

I had a nice day today. I worked half a day Saturday, so I went into work at noon, got a bunch of stuff done, learned several pieces of interesting news, came home and made a very delicious pasta dish with my yearly allowance of grotesquely expensive and artisnal bacon. I talked to Bryan while he and Odessa took a bath and sang a song about ducks and all the things they do. I gave Ruby a pan of bacon grease and she loved it. I was happily chatting away to Bryan at exactly 7:30 when it happened: the Universe collapsed on itself.

Bryan was sitting in the bath and all of a sudden he looked at me and said "I'm getting a migraine." (To fully understand the implications of this, I'll have to write a post on Bryan's head one of these days. It's a veeeeeeeery complicated place.)

Odessa, who had been playing with some colored plastic cups, looked at me and started screaming her head off.

Ruby in the other room started yelping in unexplained agony. I ran into see what's the matter with her, and Zucchini was on the ottoman eating the piece of ice cream cake that had been waiting for me. Still unsure as to whether this is what so affected Ruby.

I am nothing if not a woman who can take charge. I put sheets on the bed for Bryan, got Odessa in pajamas and stuck her on the floor of the living room, tripped over Ruby on the way to the drier. In the meantime Odessa ate the birthday card I received today and hadn't read yet, because I was waiting to read it with my ice cream cake and it had fallen on the floor during Zucchini's transgression and Odessa went over and made a sort of glue out of it with her saliva and snot (it was made out of kind of thin paper). And it had come all the way from Costa Rica. So now I know that Audrey was sitting at a cheese factory eating a mint chip ice cream cone when she wrote it, but not much else. And Odessa has only recently stopped screaming at me, and now I'm sitting in front of the wood stove (yes, it's here!) and you know what? The fire seems kind of cool. Like, chilly. Have you ever met a fire like that?

I think it's a sign that I should just start over again tomorrow when spades will be spades again.

Buenos noches, amigos.